Compile it once onto one card and then make clones of that card. (If you have two SD slots, you could use the dd command on Linux to create fast, exact copies. Even without a second SD slot, you could use dd via a temporary intermediate disk image file stored on some other medium.)

perlbrew comes in handy because it's very good at ensuring Perl installs into one particular directory without leaving any crud lying around on other parts of your system. (And also because it provides the shell aliases for swapping between different installations of Perl very easily.)

While I can do this for my current project, it's not something that can be done for cards that have on them data that should be retained. And if other data can be replicated only by cloning a card, the position is untenable. I suppose it's my unfamiliarity with Linux. I'm not surprised that there isn't a precompiled version of Perl 5.16 for the Pi, but I was expecting it to be possible to create one. The hours of compiling are guaranteed to put people off using anything but the system Perl on a Pi, which may be why Python is their language of choice.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other